Apple, a share that can give you indigestion

It produces iconic products like the iPhone and the iPad. Down the line, there may be an iWatch or an iTV.

Apple has a cool factor that other companies can only envy.

Apple is one of the biggest companies in the world. Its market capitalization, a measure of what a company is worth, is nearly $400 billion which is bigger than a lot of countries’ budgets. It has the heaviest weighting in the S&P 500, where one can find the biggest American companies.

Microsoft and Google are in the $200 billion range.

In September 2012, Apple hit a record high over $700 a share. Since then, it fell out of favor in the U.S. as competition from firms like Samsung ramped up and began a long drop that climaxed recently.

Last week was especially brutal as the stock bottomed out around $390, down almost 45% from the September peak.

The thing is I own Apple stock.

It is the biggest holding in my retirement account.

Going against every professional advice I know of, Apple shares make up about a third of my retirement holdings. The reason to buy Apple seemed flawless.

But the stock’s gyrations are really not for the faint-hearted. It can easily give one an ulcer. I sometimes would check the kitchen for a supply of tum-tums to ward off a sour stomach after looking in at Apple shares.

The pros in the stock market would suggest to Apple stockholders they should “diversify” and not put too much funds into the wild, wild west of technology shares.

Another piece of advice I hear many times is do not fall in love with a stock.

I was starting to think it may be time to do the smart thing, which was cut my losses and move the money in my online account somewhere else.

But then I remember one famous analyst saying – it maybe Warren Buffett though I’m not sure — that the time to be greedy on shares is when everybody was selling it off in fear. Apple is still a good outfit so I kept buying all the way down, digging a deeper hole for myself.

So on a cool spring afternoon, I waited in front of my computer screen waiting for the fiscal 2nd quarter results of Apple, which is based in Cupertino, California.

The buzz before the report was released was tremendous and furious. One week out, the stock analysts on CNBC and Bloomberg were talking up the critical nature of Apple’s results.

There has been a lot of pressure on Apple management ever since legendary founder Steve Jobs passed away in 2011.

The results initially boosted the shares of Apple over $20 or 5% in after-hours trading in New York.

The figures were not bad. Earnings per share was at $10.09 versus analyst estimates of $9.98. Revenues for the quarter hit $42.28 billion, against $39.2 billion in the same quarter last year. Apple also jacked up the dividend it was paying shareholders by 15 percent.

It also announced a share buy-back program which would reduce the number of shares in the market and increase the value of the remaining stock. Margins at the lower end of the range sharply pruned the gains in after-hours trading.

The more important question going forward for the company is how does Apple see its future?

The encouraging take-away from listening to the conference call is Apple CEO Tim Cook saying they are going to be releasing new products this year and next.

“We’ve got some really great stuff coming in the fall and throughout 2014,” Cook said. “We’ve got a lot more surprises in the works.”

Is the knot gone from my stomach? No. But it looks like Apple is not going to wind up like Sony or Nokia — a pair of outfits that the technology revolution has passed by.

“You’ve got to keep your focus on what’s coming,” Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, who has often been bullish on Apple, told CNBC.

If anything, I’m over a decade away from retiring. I guess there’s nothing to do now but sit tight on these Apple shares.

Rene Pastor is a freelance journalist who worked with the news agency Reuters for nearly 23 years. He graduated with a Masters degree in International Affairs from the New School in New York city and received a bachelor of arts in Communications from the Ateneo de Manila University. Rene is also a lecturer at Middlesex County College in Edison, New Jersey.